D&D Timeline

I started playing D&D sometime during 1981, but I've never been sure exactly when. I knew it was on or near my friend Kenny's birthday, because his mom gave him the Holmes Basic set (with B2) as a present.

I'm pretty sure it was the day of, because I was there when he opened it and we were both blown away to finally have our paws on the game we'd been hearing about. We spent that entire weekend sitting on his bedroom floor, diving into the rules and playing B2 like a violent version of Monopoly.

I lost contact with Kenny over the years but reconnected with him on social media. We don't live near each other and have unfortunately failed to catch up online. A few days ago, I happened to see that it was his birthday in my notifications and the light bulb went off. I now have an approximate date (mid-August) and perhaps even an exact date (August 18) for the start of my long journey into this hobby. Great memories!

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 7: The Village of Saltmarsh

Seeing as how I wrote this series of posts in a disorganized manner, it is only fitting that I end it with the starting point—the village of Saltmarsh, the party's home base while they tackle the series of modules U1–U3. Curiously, though the module describes the "little town" as playing a "pivotal role" in the series, with a "web of intrigue" that affects the party's progress, the village is given short shrift in the module's manuscript.

Instead of presenting the village and its inhabitants, the module hands the task of designing the entire thing to the DM, with advice to draw a map, establish the local businesses, and set up the town's council (and its conspirators). Some may see the omission of these details as a flexible advantage for homebrew campaigns, allowing the DM to put his stamp on the adventure; others may see it as a failure of the adventure designer to do their job. It's why you paid money for the module, right?

Interestingly, the basic "plot" of Saltmarsh is similar to the Sample Dungeon's "plot" of Portown (smugglers using nearby sea caves to run their operation, in collusion with local bribed officials), so those two pieces clicked together very well, along with new details from Zach Howard's Forgotten Smugglers' Cave adjunct. I took the background information from those three sources and crafted my own background "plot" to account for the various adventure areas of the site. 

I started the campaign without a map of the village. Instead, I gave the party a handout list of the main buildings in town along with a brief description and details about what can be acquired/accomplished in each place. This was my tabletop group's first experience with playing early-edition D&D (Advanced Labyrinth Lord in this case), so I explained that town wasn't really a place for adventure but more of an abstract base for their characters to rest and reset between sessions.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 5: The Estate Grounds

Although this is Part 5, the following material is actually the third section of my dungeon notes. I had no real plan going into this series of posts so I didn't consider a logical order of information before diving in with the manor house in Part 1. In my writeup, section 1 is the Intro and Background, section 2 is the Village of Saltmarsh, section 3 is the Estate Grounds and Manor House, section 4 is the Dungeon level, section 5 is the Sea Caves level, section 6 is the Forgotten Caves level, and section 7 is the Naga Lair.

With the Estate Grounds, my intention was to create areas of interest in the property around the Manor House, mainly to provide a more organic entrance into the overall site and to facilitate multiple entrances into the various dungeon levels. The map of the grounds started as a "sketch" in my head that I transferred straight onto the battlemat during the opening session. (Ignore the compass rose in this image; I flipped the site's orientation after this point.)

Original Estate Map (scale = ~50' hexes)

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 4: The Forgotten Caves

Finally getting back to this series after reviewing thirty submissions for Ben Gibson's Adventure Site Contest 2, including my own submission. No winner(s) have been announced yet as the final reviews continue to trickle in, but I'll certainly post the big announcement when it happens (should be soon).

In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series, I described several of the major pieces of a kilodungeon I smashed together from various old adventures: specifically the Manor House and Sea Caves from U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and the Sample Dungeon from the Holmes Basic Rulebook. Part of the Sea Caves level borrowed a few rooms from a third dungeon—Zach Howard's excellent Forgotten Smugglers' Caves. This post will cover the remainder of that dungeon, which is situated between the Zenopus Dungeon level and the Sea Caves.

Since Zach has already written up this entire thing on his own blog, I don't want to repeat too much here if I can help it. Instead, I have received the author's permission to reference his material so I'll simply cover the things I changed or added to suit my own purposes. I didn't change very much of the content, as the adventure is already well-designed; I simply reworked the map to fit the other levels, and integrated the material into my backstory of the site, tweaking a few things here and there to make it better fit the overall dungeon concept.

The original Forgotten Smugglers' Caves (FSC) is an add-on to Holmes' Sample Dungeon, taking the details of the smugglers' cave and imagining a whole hideout, abandoned long ago due to a curse perhaps laid upon the caves by Zenopus himself. The Sample Dungeon sits below the seaside village of Portown in the original writeup, and characters can find info about the FSC there.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 3: The Sea Caves

In Part 1, I reconfigured the Manor House from U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. In Part 2, I adapted the Sample Dungeon from Holmes Basic. Next, I took the excised map sections from both and created a Sea Caves level. Part of this level (the explored part) serves as the pirate base. Another dungeon level—derived from Zach Howard's excellent Forgotten Smugglers' Caves—exists between the Dungeon level and the Sea Caves, and I incorporated several areas from that into the Sea Caves level as well. I'll cover the full FSC level in an upcoming post.

By this point in the campaign, I had a pretty solid sketch map of the bluff's macro-area, showing the exterior orientations/positions of the house, the tower, the gardens and estate wall, and the not-so-obvious areas such as the sea cave entrances and a "muddy mound" in the salt swamp below the bluff. 

More importantly, by the time I got to mapping out the Sea Caves level, I had already shared the sketch map with the players, who did a really good job scouting out the whole area before delving too deep. This locked in the positions of certain sea cave entrances that had to connect with the finished Dungeon level map.

To start with, I took the bluff coastline from my sketch map and aligned it to the 4:1" grid on a blank Photoshop canvas (24" x 24", 7200 x 7200px). Then I took the sea cave segments I carved out of U1, the Sample Dungeon, and FSC, and aligned their grids to my map grid. I then reoriented and repositioned the segments to fit the bluff layout. 

I wanted the U1 sea caves to point west, to match the repositioned west wing of the manor from which the pirates signal their ship and guide the longboats into shore. I also increased the map scale for the U1 piece from the original 5' per square to 10', same as with the manor maps, to open the spaces up a bit. Green arrows indicate where the original sea caves will connect with the sea.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 2: The Dungeon Level

In Part 1, I rearranged the old manor house from U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh to serve as the anchor point for the rest of the other adventure maps. Next, I took the original map from the Sample Dungeon in Holmes basic and sized it to the same 4:1" grid I used for the manor map. The grid in the Sample Dungeon map is hand-drawn and inaccurate, so I aligned the central vault (area A) to the accurate grid and adjusted all the passages and rooms that branch out from it. Then I placed an overlay of the manor outline over area A.

Original Sample Dungeon Map with Manor Overlay (scale = 10')

To fit the geographic location in my campaign world chosen for this site, the Sea Caves need to face south instead of west. To make that change and keep the basic flow of the dungeon, I also need to reposition rooms H, I, K, L, and M, as well as the connection from room J.